Lot 173: Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. , The Princess; a Medley. Edward Moxon, 1847

8vo, first edition, presentation copy inscribed by the author to henry hallam ("H. Hallam | from | A. A Tennyson"), later nineteenth-century calf, marbled boards, some discolouration to B8 verso and C1 recto, and also to endpapers and half-title, binding slightly worn at edges

Wise 24; Tinker 2067

Henry Hallam, presentation inscription from the author; his daughter Julia (the only one of his eleven children to survive him); her husband Captain John Cator, later Lennard; by direct descent from the family

a presentation copy by tennyson to the father of arthur henry hallam, whose sudden death in 1833 had such a profound effect on the author and the rest of his Cambridge circle of intimate friends. Tennyson had met A.H. Hallam (1811-1833) at Trinity College Cambridge around April 1829. Their subseqent friendship, "deepening into love...was to be one of the most important experiences of Hallam's short life and of Tennyson's long one..." (Oxford DNB). The Princess was the only volume of poetry Tennyson published in the alter 1840s, as he expended energy on completing his great elegy for Hallam, In Memoriam, eventually published in 1850. The historian Henry Hallam ( (1777-1859) wrote well-documented accounts of medieval and English constitutional history from a whig standpoint. He also wrote a four-volume history of European literature (1837-1839).